The Tribune

By RUPERT MISSICK Jr

A FLOUNDERING economy in the 1970s left the country desperate and encouraged some within the leadership of the governing PLP to to make the conscious decision to partner with drug lords, Majority Rule MP Ed Moxey told The Tribune.

“They needed to help the economy, they needed the money so they sold the country out to these drug pushers,” the former PLP MP said.

“There were drug colonies in Andros, in Exuma, in Guana Cay and Norman’s Cay. Everyone knew what was going on and it touched everyone. Even Sir Lynden knew and he turned a blind eye to it,” Mr Moxey said.

Before Independence, Nassau had a reputation as a haven for fashionable winter tourists from North America and a few visitors from Europe.

These visitors brought with them a significant amount of capital to buy land and joined their counterparts from the United States and Canada in becoming investors in the Bahamian economy.

As the decades passed, travel, especially by air, would become cheaper and more accessible. The Bahamas, like many other destinations around the world, opted for the quantity of guest over quality.

These realities made the 1970s a watershed decade for the Bahamian tourism industry. In addition, the great social upheaval within the Bahamas, starting with the advent of majority rule in 1967 and ending with independence in 1973, would force the government of the day to investigate alternative sources of income – new investors, if you will, that would replace the foreign investors that became gun-shy after independence.

According to Mr Moxey, the economy was wounded and the PLP was worried, not only about the dire straits in which the country found itself, but they had an election, the 1976 general election, coming up and feared going back to their constituencies with “their hands swinging”.

At the time, the only people with enough money to float the economy and who were willing to invest it in the young nation were the cocaine cowboys of South America.

Mr Moxey said it was a conscious decision by some members of the party’s leadership to respond to the courtship of the druglords.

“That is one of the areas where we went totally off course when we allowed and participated in the drug trade in this country,” Mr Moxey said.

However, it did not stop with the country’s political class.

“It would shock you to know how much money the drug pushers put in churches. You would be surprised by how many churches got donations from drug pushers for blocks to build their church and so on,” he said.

Because of the country’s involvement in the drug trade and how compromised many members of the government were at the time, Mr Moxey said he believes that the 1982 general election should have been the last one Sir Lynden contested.

“He should have not run in the 1987 general election after all of those accusations. We would have been better off if he just bowed off. We didn’t do what we set out to do, I believe.

“When you look at what happened on Paradise Island, for instance, it is a good thing if you look at it with a view of employment. When you look at what is happening on Cable Beach in Baha Mar, at our place in our local economy you would have to conclude that we are still servants, the masses of the people are still servants.”

Mr Moxey said that the PLP’s majority rule revolution hadn’t sparked the kind of ownership for which he had hoped.

“When we took over the country, the merchant government that was ruling the country said ‘well these fellows have taken over and they know what to do’ so they packed up, most of them and their companies.

“People like Donald D’Albenas withdrew and said we knew what to do. They left it for us to take over and stood out there for a period and when they saw what happened, that we didn’t know what to do, they came back and re-established themselves. They came to the conclusion that we had no interest in being the owners of the economy. After all of these years of independence, we have not risen to the occasion of ownership of this country,” he said.

Mr Moxey said that the PLP’s philosophy in 1961, in addition to political take over of the country, was the expansion of programmes that would create a strong society and the exploration of our heritage.

“We had the social, cultural and economic empowerment of our people to direct and, when you look at it, one must agree that we have fallen down in all those areas. We were to deal with the social development of the people who had been socially neglected. There has been no positive developmental programme in the country from 1965 till now.”

(To be continued).